Tuesday, March 31, 2015

It seems to me that the media/elite freakout over the Indiana law is a moral panic analogous to the freakout over the UVA rape case. People rushed like lemmings to endorse as true something that turned out to be a hoax because it confirmed their prejudices about Bad Classes of People. This is why so many in the media are making no pretense to be fair in their reporting and commentary on the Indiana law. As Mollie Hemingway avers, the most interesting — and most worrying — aspect of all this is that religious liberty is not considered to be important at all to very many people in this country, especially the most powerful people.

Notre Dame’s Pat Deneen wrote this weekend on Facebook that law school friends tell him of plans underway now by progressive law profs to “Bob Jones” churches and religious institutions that have policies they consider discriminatory against LGBT people. That is, they want to campaign to take away tax exempt status from all religious entities that have traditional views and practices related to homosexuality. This is the next frontier. Many churches and religious entities operate so close to the margins, budget-wise, that they will not be able to survive this.

This is coming. Remember when they told us that SSM would not affect the rest of us? Do you now see that this was a lie? As I have been saying:

The Law Of Merited Impossibility is an epistemological construct governing the paradoxical way overclass opinion makers frame the discourse about the clash between religious liberty and gay civil rights. It is best summed up by the phrase, “It’s a complete absurdity to believe that Christians will suffer a single thing from the expansion of gay rights, and boy, do they deserve what they’re going to get.”

If the Indiana witch hunt doesn’t convince you of the truth of the Law of Merited Impossibility, you are deluded.

Monday, March 30, 2015

Because Germanwings pilot Andreas Lubitz killed himself when he purposefully drove a plane carrying 149 other people into a mountain in the Alps, there has been an assumption that he suffered from “depression”— an assumption strengthened by the discovery of antidepressants in his home and reports that he had been treated in psychiatry and neurology clinics. Many patients and other interested parties are rightly concerned that Lubitz’s murderous behavior will further stigmatize the mentally ill.

It is certainly true that stigma may lead those in need to avoid treatment. When I was a psychiatrist at an HIV clinic, I was baffled by the shame associated with a visit to see me. Patients at the clinic had advanced AIDS, often contracted through IV drug use or sex work, and many had unprotected sex despite their high viral loads. Some were on parole. Many had lost custody of their children. Many lived in notorious single-room occupancy housing and used cocaine daily. But these issues, somehow, were less embarrassing than the suggestion that they be evaluated by a psychiatrist.

For my clinic patients, it was shameful to be mentally ill. But to engage in antisocial behavior as a way of life? Not so bad.

I think my patients were on to something. Bad behavior—even suicidal behavior—is not the same as depression. It is a truism in psychiatry that depression is underdiagnosed. But as a psychiatrist confronted daily with “problem” patients in the general hospital where I work, I find that depression is also overdiagnosed. Even doctors invoke “depression” to explain anything a reasonable adult wouldn’t do.

For instance: Act completely blasé, then lock the pilot out of the cockpit, and deliberately crash a plane full of people.

I don’t know what that is, but it’s not depression.

In the hospital where I practice, a small but regular population of patients are young men who sustained gunshot wounds during or in proximity to gang-related activities. Now paralyzed, they are admitted for pressure ulcers or urinary tract infections. These men were accustomed to getting their needs met through intimidation and even murder. Now they are dependent on nurses and aides for intimate care, and it hasn’t made them any nicer. They terrorize staff by throwing urinals and food and sexually harassing them. When I am asked to evaluate for “depression,” I see hopelessness, entitlement, and rage.

And it’s not just antisocial behavior that is explained away by calling it “depression.” I’m often asked to see patients with poorly managed chronic diseases; for example, diabetics who neglect to do fingersticks to draw blood and test their blood sugar. Recently I did a consultation for a patient who is on dialysis and ignores the low-salt “renal diet” prescribed by her doctor. Her insistence on eating chips led her nephrologist to wonder if she were depressed; after all, wouldn’t a mentally healthy person give up junk food to save her own life?

We are experiencing the effects of a culture that can rationalize away any behavior and, as a result, minimize evil.

We may never know why Lubitz decided to not only end his life but the lives of 149 other people in any secular sense but... we should all agree that what he did is inexcusably wicked.

Or is that in and of itself wicked?

I can't help but think of Elizabeth Scalia's Strange Gods, Unmasking the Idols of Everyday Life (I wrote about that book here). Every attempt is being made to mask our need for God and particularly His Son Jesus Christ. In His place we are putting every sort of substitute and paying the price.

Friday, March 27, 2015

Murder will not be among the charges filed Friday by Boulder County's District Attorney against the woman accused of attacking a pregnant woman and cutting the unborn child from her womb.

Dynel Lane, 34, was arrested last week after she allegedly brought the deceased fetus to the hospital. According to the arrest report, Lane admitted to a detective that she cut open the victim's abdomen to remove it. Staff at the hospital said the baby would have been viable.

After the announcement of the arrest, District Attorney Stan Garnett said he would wait for the results of an autopsy before deciding if Lane should be charged with murder.

"The issue of whether or not murder charges are appropriate involving a case involving the death of a fetus or late-term pregnancy is always a difficult issue," he said last week. "Under Colorado law, there's no way murder charges can be brought if it is not established that the fetus lived as a child outside the body of the mother for some period of time. I don't know the answer yet as to whether that could be established – what our facts are here. One of the issues that we will need to evaluate in connection with that is the medical information from the autopsy."

Thursday evening, Garnett's office confirmed to 7NEWS that murder will not be among the charges filed during a hearing on Friday.

Since he has decided not to charge Lane with murder of the fetus, Garnett is likely to charge her with unlawful termination of a pregnancy and other charges stemming from the attack on the expectant mother.

AB 6221 passed the State Assembly 94-49, and would expand the leniency for third trimester abortions. If AB 6221 passes the Senate and becomes law, the wording of the abortion statute will allow full-term abortions as long as it’s “relevant to the well-being of the patient.”

Reasons included under the new language would be, emotional, familial, age, physical, or psychological. So for example, if a potential mother feels she’s not “emotionally stable” to handle a baby two weeks before birth, New York will allow her to have an abortion. In addition, it would allow these procedures to be performed by non-doctors who would inject poison into the full-term fetuses heart to stop it.

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Police have arrested a woman after witnesses say she threw a Molotov cocktail-type device at people holding a prayer vigil at a South Austin Planned Parenthood on Monday, according to an arrest affidavit.

Police said 52-year-old Melanie Maria Toney threw the object out the passenger side window of her car where two anti-abortion protesters standing outside of the clinic at 201 East Ben White Boulevard around 6:30 p.m. Monday.

One of the protesters, Ruth Allwein, said she was praying in the grassy area as a volunteer with Texas Alliance for Life when she saw Toney throw the bottle.

"It looked like some sort of bottle, and it had an ignited wick in it, so my first instinct was backing away," said Allwein.

Allwein said she stomped out the fire and pulled out the wick to make sure the fire did not make contact with the contents of the bottle. The affidavit states the flaming item was a "Gum Out" fuel additive bottle with a burned piece of paper towel that had been rolled into a wick and lit on fire, a Molotov cocktail-type device.

Toney admitted to throwing a bottle out the window with some paper in it and said it "might" have been smoldering when she threw it.

Toney is charged with aggravated assault.

Imagine for a moment the outcry had it actually been the abortion clinic that was targeted, and not a group of people praying at that clinic.

But instead, there's nothing to see here folks. Nothing at all. We came close to being awash in stories focused on the latest battle of the war on women but... because these were women who were praying for victims rather than preying on victims, there's no there there.

Two Bay Area lawmakers are seeking an investigation of working conditions at high schools administrated by the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco, over the archbishop’s proposed morality clauses for teachers.

“California cannot become a laboratory for discrimination under the guise of religion,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter sent Monday. They said the rules “set a dangerous precedent for workers’ rights through manipulations of law that deprive employees of civil rights guaranteed to all Californians.”

Last week, Ting and Mullin were among eight Bay Area lawmakers who sent Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone a letter calling the proposal “divisive” and urging him to drop the clauses from the teachers’ handbook.

The archbishop’s proposal asks “administrators, faculty and staff of any faith or of no faith, are expected to arrange and conduct their lives so as not to visibly contradict, undermine or deny” church teachings, including opposition to abortion, contraception and homosexuality.

First they satisfied themselves with a letter. Now they're looking to use their power to launch investigations. What comes tomorrow?

A dark cloud for anyone who believes in the notion of religious liberty.

BERKELEY, Calif., March 11, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — On April 16-17, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry (CLGS) at Pacific School of Religion will host a symposium addressing the ways in which the concept of “religious liberty” is being used to justify and further discriminatory actions, such as denying service to same sex couples or limiting the reproductive health care benefits for employees. “Religious liberty should emphasize our freedoms — the right to worship, to self-expression — and should never be used as an excuse for discrimination against any group of people,” states Dr. Bernard Schlager, executive director of CLGS and Dean of Pacific School of Religion.

The focus of the symposium will be to articulate a theologically-based and positive definition of religious liberty that explains why religious liberty should not be used as a license to discriminate. The symposium will also consider how the concept of religious liberty can be used to further religious pluralism in the United States.

This is the next step in the fight. It never was going to be enough for progressives to get gay marriage and discrimination against LGBTs outlawed except for within religious organizations. Now the push from progressive elites will be to tear down the wall protecting religious liberty to punish the wrongthinkers. If you don’t think this is coming, you are a fool. The Law of Merited Impossibility is vindicated more and more each day.

Time to lawyer up with the Becket Fund and other religious liberty legal organizations. This is where the battle is now.

I see a day coming, sooner rather than later, where faithful people will be punished for holding to traditional beliefs, where discrimination against them (us) will not only be encouraged but demanded.

Monday, March 23, 2015

It was more than five years ago that the gunshots rang out, but those of us who survived can still hear their echoes. On Nov. 5, 2009, an Army psychiatrist named Nidal Hasan—an American radicalized by extremist Islamic beliefs—opened fire on his fellow soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas, killing 14 people, including an unborn child, and wounding 32.

I was there. A beloved friend, Capt. John Gaffaney, died at my knees. I was slated to become the shooter’s direct supervisor and later learned I was at the top of his hit list.

That day has faded from the minds of most Americans. But the survivors and the families of the deceased continually relive its horror. They also continue to face betrayal by the government they served.

***

At about 1:34 p.m., Hasan, seated in a building on base and armed with an FN five-seven pistol and a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver, paused to bow his head. Then he stood up from behind a cubicle, shouted “Allahu akbar!” (God is great) and began spraying bullets throughout the room. Soldiers, including my friend John, charged the shooter but were gunned down before they could reach him.

Hasan took direct aim at those in uniform, including 21-year-old Pvt. Francheska Velez, who had disarmed bombs in Iraq and recently learned she was nine weeks pregnant. One survivor testified that she heard Velez plead, “Please don’t, please don’t. My baby, my baby!” Hasan shot her in the chest. Velez was headed home to Chicago for leave. Instead, she and her child died on the floor at Fort Hood.

The shooter continuously reloaded his weapons as unarmed soldiers tried to escape. After he left the building to continue his rampage, others dashed inside, secured the doors with a belt and began rendering emergency treatment. The floor was so slick with blood that those responding later said they found it hard to reach the wounded and dying.

Hasan exchanged gunfire outside with civilian police Sgt. Kimberly Munley, who was struck in the thigh and femur. As she fell, her weapon reportedly jammed and the shooter kicked it from her grasp. Finally, 10 minutes after the massacre began, Hasan was downed by five shots from another civilian police officer, Sgt. Mark Todd, and taken into custody.

Investigators found 146 shell casings inside the building and another 68 in the surrounding area. The shooter had almost as many unused rounds, 177, tucked in his pockets in 20- and 30-round extended magazines.

Hasan’s goal was to kill as many soldiers as possible. He was cold-eyed and systematic. We should have seen him coming.

The FBI and the Defense Department possessed sufficient information, collected over several years, to have detected Hasan’s radicalization. During his training, Hasan routinely and unmistakably violated strict standards by communicating with suspected terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki—email that the FBI intercepted. In 2007 he was required for his residency to give a scholarly psychiatric presentation. Instead he lectured on Islam, stating that nonbelievers should be beheaded and set on fire, and suggested that Muslim-Americans in the military pose a risk of fratricide. In another talk, Hasan justified suicide bombings on grounds that the U.S. is at war with Islam.

Both an instructor and a colleague referred to Hasan as a “ticking time bomb.” But his shocking conduct was ignored. Officer-evaluation reports “sanitized his obsession with violent Islamist extremism into praiseworthy research on counterterrorism,” a 2011 congressional review states. Political correctness, to which the military continues to bow, led many to fear that reporting Hasan would result in career-ending charges of racial or religious discrimination.

***

It is a gross miscarriage of justice that no one who supervised the shooter—overlooked his behavior and promoted him—has been held accountable.

Every epoch, including our own, has its own idols. One of our challenges is to find ways to avoid the Gospels being shackled in service to them.

Political correctness is one of the idols or secular sins of our times. Sometimes it is described as being trendy, up-to-date, attuned to the times and worthy of praise. Political correctness is not the same as being stylish or following the fads in the clothing industry. There is correctness there, but it is not political. It is different from the cultural norms of society, which involve customs and mores. European society is different from African society. The difference is not about political correctness. New England hospitality is different from southern hospitality. That is not about political correctness. Political correctness has to do with movements that set a new social standard to be imposed on others by an elite group. What makes it a scourge is that it insists on forced conformity for the sake of conformity.

Political correctness has been around for centuries. What is new in this post-modern age is the use of super sophisticated tools of social manipulation to help people gradually change their view without being conscious of these efforts of social manipulation.

...

Pope John Paul II reminded the bishops of Ireland in June 1999: "Christianity teaches the truth, a truth which, we ourselves, have not devised, but which comes to us as a gift . . . " He then added that they should "proclaim the truth courageously, even if what you teach sometimes goes against socially accepted opinion."

In Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul II said: "If there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power".

Friday, March 20, 2015

One of man’s persistent dreams is to find a good reason he can’t help sinning. It started with Adam’s trying to blame Eve. Modern man naturally turns to science for this, and as he has learned more about himself and the world around him, he has also grown more ingenious in finding ways to explain why he cannot help breaking the moral law. On the one hand we have cell phones and brain surgery, on the other sophisticated defenses of sexual treachery.

One popular excuse for sinning I call the “Margaret Mead Method.” I was reminded of it when flipping through my files and finding an article titled “The Virtues of Promiscuity,” the kind of title that gets your attention.

According to a journalist named Sally Lehrman, writing in The San Francisco Chronicle, anthropologists have found that “‘Slutty’ behavior is good for the species. Women everywhere have been selflessly engaging in trysts outside of matrimony for a good long time and for excellent reasons. Anthropologists say female promiscuity binds communities closer together and improves the gene pool.”

Some primitive tribes, these anthropologists claim, assume that women having sex with more than one man will help them survive, and even thrive. At least twenty “accept the principle that a child could, and ideally ought to, have more than one father.”

For all I know, this may be true. Every culture gets sex wrong, and female promiscuity may be these tribes’ peculiar way of getting it wrong. Sluttishness may be the sort of thing from which Christianity could deliver them, as it could deliver the American male whose culture demands sexual conquests as a sign of success.

As you might expect, the writer doesn’t leave it there.

We've sunk so low that now we look to science to support our tendency to build walls between ourselves and God.

Saturday, March 14, 2015

The confessional is one of the most private and privileged places in the world. So when an Italian journalist violated the bond of trust between penitent and priest, the Archbishop of Bologna decried her “grave lack of respect” for all Catholics.

Laura Alari writes for Quotidiano Nazionale, which is headquartered in Bologna. She authored a series of four articles in the newspaper which disclosed the responses of priests in the area when she approached them under the pretext of seeking Confession.

Alari went to Confession several times, inventing delicate issues for herself: she pretended to be a lesbian mother asking to baptize her daughter; a woman who cohabitates with her same-sex partner; and a divorced and civilly remarried woman who receives Communion every Sunday.

She then reported the responses of priests when they heard her “confessions.”

Cardinal Carlo Caffarra of Bologna responded with a statement March 11: “In bewilderment at the incident and with a soul wounded by a profound sorrow, I mean to reiterate that these articles objectively constitute a grave offense against the truth of Confession, a sacrament of the Christian faith.”

He said Alari's articles “show a grave lack of respect for believers, who have recourse to it as one of the most precious of goods because it opens up to them the gifts of the mercy of God; and for confessors, by exposing them to the doubt of a possible deceit, which can disrupt the freedom of judgement, which is founded upon a relationship of trust with the penitent, like that between a father and son.”

The cardinal emphasized that Alari's articles were written by “deliberately tricking the confessor and thereby violating the sacredness of the sacrament, which as a first condition requires sincerity of contrition on the part of the penitent.”

Cardinal Caffarra recalled that the publication of the contents of a confession is among the most grave crimes in the Church, which are under the direct competence of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The following story, coming out of ever so tolerant San Francisco, gives evidence for even more disrespect:

San Franciscans are currently debating a simple question: Should the government respect the right of Catholic schools to be authentically Catholic?

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone thinks so. But eight California senators and assemblymen sent the archbishop a letter last month, saying that his actions in issuing new faculty guidelines “foment a discriminatory environment in the communities we serve.” On Feb. 23, two of the signers even asked the California Assembly Labor and Employment Committee and the Assembly Judiciary Committee to investigate the archdiocese’s actions.

Here’s the back story. During contract renegotiations with nearly 500 staff members last month, the archdiocese issued an updated faculty guide for its Catholic high schools. The addendum introduced three new clauses—which staff members are required to “affirm and believe”—denouncing masturbation, pornography, same-sex marriage, contraception and other issues that, in line with Catholic teaching, are described as “gravely evil.”

These beliefs shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the Catholic Church—the 2,000-year-old institution has clearly defined its moral teachings throughout the years. Yet lawmakers objected, contending in a Feb. 17 letter to the archdiocese that the new guide is “divisive.” They asserted that by spelling out the teachings of the Catholic Church and requiring high-school staff to not publicly undermine those teachings, teachers could be dismissed for private decisions not in accord with Catholic teaching.

The archbishop responded, calling the idea that the clauses could apply to an employee’s private life a “falsehood” in a Feb. 19 letter. Then he put a question to the lawmakers: “Would you hire a campaign manager who advocates policies contrary to those that you stand for, and who shows disrespect toward you and the Democratic Party in general?” Of course they wouldn’t, and Archbishop Cordileone summed up the problem: “I respect your right to employ or not employ whomever you wish to advance your mission. I simply ask the same respect from you.”

Archbishop Cordileone also explained that the mission of Catholic education is to ensure that students receive a complete education: intellectually, spiritually and morally. If teachers are to fulfill this goal, they must be consistent in what they teach in the classroom and in what they advocate in the public square.

Journalists and politicians, purveyors of prevarication, leading the charge against the Catholic Church.

Thursday, March 12, 2015

"IS destroyed the front wall of St. George monastery to remove the big built in cross," Archimandrite Emanuel Youkhana, a member of the Assyrian Church of the East who runs a humanitarian aid effort out of Dohuk in northern Iraq, told Aleteia.

The crosses that stood on the dome and roof of the monastery had been removed by jihadists in December, similarl to what happened to the other churches in the territories controlled by the Islamic State. Local sources and the photo published by the Iraqi website confirms that the cemetery adjacent to the church, where the bodies of many Iraqi Christian soldiers killed during the Iraq-Iran war are buried, was destroyed.

In recent times, according to news confirmed by various sources, the monastery of St. George had been used by jihadists as a place of detention. In December, there were at least 150 prisoners who were transferred blindfolded and handcuffed, including some chief tribal Sunni opponents of the Islamic State and former members of the security apparatus, previously held in the prison in Badush. Previously, local sources had reported to Fides that groups of women were brought to the same monastery.

Erica Hunter, senior lecturer in Eastern Christianity at the University of London, explained in an email to Aleteia that Mar Gorgis was one of the oldest churches in Mosul.

"Daesh (I do not use the term ISIS/ISIL since it conveys some concept of a quasi-state) have destroyed mosques, tombs and other medieval sites, as well as the recent destruction of Nimrud, so regrettably I see the medieval churches of Mosul as being 'on their list' of cultural destruction, which of course undermines the morale of the local inhabitants," she said.

Nineveh Yakou, Assyrian Archaeologist and Director of Cultural Heritage and Indigenous Affairs at A Demand for Action, told IBTimes UK that the monastery was founded by the Assyrian Church of the East in the 10th century but rebuilt as a seminary by the Chaldean Catholic Church in 1846.

"The current monastery was built on an archeological site containing ancient Assyrian ruins. It was an important show of continuity from the Assyrian to our culture," Yakou said.

"Isis is wiping out the cultural heritage of Iraq. The monastery was classified as cultural heritage. It's a cultural and ethnic cleansing."

A travesty taking place before the world's eyes... and the world does... pretty much nothing about it.